Read Cosmopath - [Bengal Station 03] for Free Online Page B

call it.
     
    Her academic work had continued as before and she’d visited colony worlds friendly to the Indian cause, where reality was just another version of that on Earth, despite some interesting local variations and some genuinely bizarre aliens.
     
    Her life, for so long, had been uneventful... and then she’d found a lover, and now she was being followed by an assassin.
     
    Except, she told herself, she was imagining things.
     
    She drank her beer and thought about visiting Rab on Bengal Station.
     
    And then she saw the Chinese guy, and her heart juddered.
     
    He eased himself through the press in the street, stood on the sidewalk looking up at her apartment, and then pushed through the revolving door and disappeared inside.
     
    She activated her screen and stared at the revealed picture. It showed an empty landing, the top of the stairwell, and the elevator door opposite her apartment.
     
    Holding her breath, she waited... Ten seconds later the man appeared on the landing.
     
    The camera looked down on him from above the door of her apartment: it showed a lean-faced man in his early thirties. He looked fit, agile, but something in his dark eyes was dead.
     
    The eyes of an assassin, she thought.
     
    He took something from the pocket of his jacket, applied it to the lock, and a second later slipped into her apartment.
     
    She tapped her handset and the image on the screen flickered and switched to one showing her lounge. The man moved quickly, stepping through to her bedroom to check for her in there, and then into the bathroom. He returned to the lounge, checked the sliding door to the fire-escape, ensured that it was locked, then drew the drapes and looked around the lounge. He selected a reclining chair, dragged it to the centre of the room and positioned it facing the door. He sat down, drew a slim pistol from his jacket, and waited for her to arrive home and meet her death.
     
    She raised the bottle to her lips. She was shaking so much that she dribbled beer down her chin. She replaced the bottle on the table and stared at the screen. She had a sidewise view of the killer, sitting calmly in her chair, and she wondered at the psyche of someone who could willingly accept the commission to end another’s life.
     
    She smiled to herself. She had the guy where she wanted him; she was angry, and she wanted to know why she was being targeted. She also wanted him to know that he had failed, that she had been equal to him; that the hunted had become the hunter.
     
    The assassin knew that she was a telepath, so he would be shielded. She wouldn’t be able to approach the building, send out a probe and read his motives. She would have to take him alive, rip out his shield - wherever that might be - and then read him.
     
    But how to go about that?
     
    She finished her beer and left the bar, shouldering her way across the crowded street to the tenement. She stepped through the revolving door and came to the stairs. She decided to climb them rather than take the lift.
     
    On the first landing she checked her handset. The guy was still seated, silent, impassive. She hurried up to the fourth floor and stepped lightly across the landing, leaning against the wall to the left of her door and drawing her laser.
     
    She watched the killer on the screen, then hunkered down to wait.
     
    There were three other apartments on this, the top level; one was owned by a businessman who she knew was out of town at the moment, one by a cop who worked till midnight, and the third was vacant. She wouldn’t be disturbed by neighbours asking what on earth she was doing squatting outside her own apartment.
     
    She watched the screen and settled down for a long wait. She knew she had the advantage; sooner or later he would move, slip to the loo, or decide to help himself to a snack. She’d be ready when he returned.
     
    The man had obviously done his homework. He knew she arrived home between six and six-thirty weekdays,